


Love's Truest Language

by taeminuet



Category: SHINee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Language of Flowers, M/M, in the Form of Flowers Growing out of Skin, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-07
Updated: 2018-12-07
Packaged: 2019-09-13 10:04:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16890495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taeminuet/pseuds/taeminuet
Summary: The next morning, Taemin woke up with a single yellow tulip on the back of his neck, and Jinki woke up with nothing at all.In which the touch of your soulmate can make flowers bloom.





	Love's Truest Language

Taemin’s known for a while that someone will find out. It’s more a matter of when than anything, because it’s not like he gets anything like privacy or personal space in his life, not really. It’s been longer than he imagined it would be, anyways, and some part of him has grown so used to the curious lack of recognition that it almost does startle the hell out of him when Kibum reaches over and taps the back of his shoulder. “You want to tell us something?”

Taemin sucks in a breath hard, eyes flickering up to look across the room for a moment. He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and he can’t personally see it, but he sees where Kibum’s eyes are looking, just at the back of his neck, beneath his newly shorn hair. Dammit. Taemin had liked having long hair for a reason.

“It’s nothing, hyung,” he says with a smile so sweet that he almost bets on it being a foolproof distraction.

It’s not, of course. “Nothing?” Kibum repeats, dubiously, and his fingers pluck at the back of Taemin’s shirt, trying to tug it down for a better look. His fingers catch awkwardly, just at the edge of one of the petals, and Taemin gurgles out a noise of protest, twisting away from his hyung.

“Nothing. I’m not going to be taking my shirt off on stage anyways, hyung,” he says, trying to brush it off.

Kibum frowns. “That’s not the point, Taemin,” he says. “This is important!”

“It’s… it’s really not, hyung,” Taemin says, and maybe there’s something in his voice that makes Kibum back off, or maybe it’s their manager coming over that silences him. Taemin gets a look that says they’ll be discussing it later anyway.

Taemin locks himself in the bathroom that night and cuts the stem, right at the base, biting down on a towel to muffle his scream.

–

When Taemin was little, he used to crawl into his grandmother’s lap. He’d always loved flowers, since the day he was old enough to remember, and his grandmother had such pretty ones. He used to point to them, recite their names reverently; chrysanthemum, delphinium, bird of paradise. She was a garden all along her shoulders, and she would tell Taemin of how his grandfather had slipped an arm around her shoulders one evening, trying to be charming, and woken the next day to find ivy and delphinium of his own growing down the length of his arm.

“Love makes the flowers bloom,” she used to tell Taemin, letting him touch her shoulders with the kind of near-reverence that only a child with the knowledge of how delicate something was could be. His fingers would stroke the petals, slide down the stems to where they grew right out of her skin like it was soil.

“Are there roots in there?” he asked, once, feeling awed and horrified all at once.

“No one knows for sure,” she answered him, pulling him away and sitting him back in her lap, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. “But if there are, they’re deep, deep down, all the way in my heart.”

–

His grandma’s garden had died the day Taemin’s grandfather had, and Taemin had wept as much for the loss of that beauty as the loss of his grandfather.

–

Taemin’s mother had never grown flowers, not really. She was happy, and she loved his father, he knew that much, but there had never been a garden growing from her body. Taemin had always wondered why but never dared ask.

In all of his fairy tales, all of his books and movies, people held hands and grew flowers from between their fingers, had soft moments where a hand fell on a leg and flowers bloomed there within moments. Taemin thought some of these were inconvenient at best, but they were always there, always a plethora of roses, red and bright.

Some of the parents of the other kids at school had flowers blooming from their skin; others did not. Some part of Taemin knew it was rude to ask.

But children were children, and as he grew older there would be teasing among the other boys. “Go and try to hold her hand. See if she makes you grow flowers.”

Taemin never did. It felt disrespectful, strange. He remembered his grandmother laughing about a man shyly trying to wrap his arm around her. He’d rather have that than a hand full of flowers from a girl he hardly knew.

–

When he became a trainee, Taemin forgot about the flowers for a little while. He forgot about everything but dancing and sleeping. He forgot, some days, that there was sunlight outside, that the world wasn’t just fluorescent lights and incessant beats. He forgot that he didn’t know how to sing well, and that he wasn’t good with words, and that he was young and small and shy. When he was dancing, he forgot the world existed.

Some days, most days, he would drop into his bed in the trainee dorms and fall asleep before his head hit the pillow and be awake again before dawn to go to school, because school was still important. Just not as important as dancing.

They wanted him to sing, though. They wanted him to sing, and it wasn’t enough that he went to vocal lessons every day. He was still a teenager. He was still going through puberty, and how was it his fault if he didn’t have perfect vocal control when it was only recently that his voice had stopped cracking with every other word?

He tried, for a bit, to get away from the fluorescent lights, the incessant beats. He retreated to the roof, where he could hear himself think, where he could hear the flaws in his voice. Where he could hear someone else’s voice when they came up to do the same as him.

There would be stories told, later, about them singing on the roof together, but Taemin won’t ever be able to truly encapsulate the way Jinki smiled at him when he hit the right note, the way it made Taemin remember that there was more to the world than just dancing, if only for a moment.

–

Moving from being a trainee to an idol didn’t give Taemin any more time to think. It just meant he had a place in a group and a stage name that wasn’t really a stage name, and no more time to breathe than before.

But it also meant that the boy from the roof smiled at him, wrapping his hand gently around the back of Taemin’s neck with a smile. “Congratulations, Taeminnie,” he said, squeezing so lightly Taemin wondered if he was only imagining it. “We did it.”

The next morning, Taemin woke up with a single yellow tulip on the back of his neck, and Jinki woke up with nothing at all.

–

Kibum doesn’t leave Taemin alone. Even now that there’s nothing there, Kibum eyes him daily. Taemin smiles at him, as best he can, plays it off.

He should be more careful, he thinks, but when the tulip begins to grow back, yet again, as insistent as always, Taemin doesn’t cut it right away. Not until Jonghyun notices too.

Jonghyun has no sense of personal space, not really. He’s in every one else’s constantly, and it’s as reassuring as it is a little unnerving sometimes. Taemin’s grown to expect being touched when he least expects it and finding his hyung there, and he doesn’t mind, exactly, but it still startles him sometimes. Especially when he’s practicing his vocal warmups one day and there is suddenly someone hanging off of him, laughing with his breath against his throat, too close, making Taemin shudder.

Jonghyun’s hand is on the space between his shoulder blades, flattening the stem a little, making Taemin pull away reflexively. Jonghyun stares at Taemin in wonder for a moment and then grins. “Our little Taeminnie, all grown up, huh? Who is it?”

Taemin knows better than to say. He also knows that Jonghyun is more persistent than Kibum. Kibum is a force to be reckoned with, but Jonghyun is a whirlwind of sheer tenacity with none of the subtlety, and Taemin knows better than to brush this one away. He puts on a smile. “No one, hyung,” he answers, the lie too easy on his tongue. “I just woke up one day and it was there. I don’t know.”

“Do you know what it means, at least?” Jonghyun asks. “That’d be a good start to finding out.”

“I don’t think so, hyung,” Taemin says. “You can’t try and guess a person from what flower they leave.”

Mostly, he says it because he’s not sure he wants to know. It’s tempting, of course, to look up meanings, to try and guess, but a part of him already doesn’t want to know if tulips mean sorrow or unrequited love or something. He can guess that much by the blankness of Jinki’s hand.

“Can I see?” Jonghyun asks, and peels down the back of Taemin’s shirt. His fingers are honestly a little invasive feeling, but they’re soft and warm, and Taemin doesn’t mind too much until Jonghyun’s fingers catch on something near the base of the stem that makes Taemin’s breath hitch, makes him jerk away.

“Sorry,” he chokes out. Jonghyun’s backed away a few steps, hands held up in surrender, concern on his face. Taemin feels a little bad for upsetting him. “It’s, uh… it’s more sensitive than I–”

“Taemin, have you been cutting it?” Jonghyun asks, and Taemin notices for the first time the bloodless tone to his cheeks.

He squirms. “Yeah. I can’t let the fans see.”

“Taemin…” Jonghyun says, softer now, sounding so upset. His arms find Taemin again, wrapping around him hard and fast. It’s better this time, now that Taemin expects it, and Jonghyun’s arms are a comforting warmth. “Taemin, don’t cut it anymore.”

“I have to,” Taemin insists, and if Jonghyun looks horrified and a little sick when he touches Taemin’s shoulders again two days later and finds only the shortest hint of a stem, Taemin tries his hardest to ignore it.

–

“Jonghyun’s worried about you.”

It’s not  _fair,_ Taemin thinks. Of course Jonghyun doesn’t know, but he’s still sent the one person that Taemin can’t talk to about this after him, and Taemin looks up from his homework to see Jinki smiling down at him.

“What about, hyung?” Taemin asks, feigning nonchalance.

“He won’t say. He says it’s your story to tell,” Jinki says, and Taemin has never been so glad for Jonghyun. Sort of. “What is there to tell?”

“Nothing, hyung,” Taemin answers dutifully. “I don’t know what Jonghyun’s talking about.”

“Are you sure?” Jinki asks. He sounds worried. It sucks how worried Jinki sounds, and Taemin finds the truth on the back of his tongue all too quickly.

He forces it down. “I really don’t know,” he lies. “Jonghyunnie-hyung’s just a worrier.”

“Taemin, you know that if you ever need to talk, I’m always here to listen,” Jinki says, smiling so sweetly it makes Taemin’s heart ache. He reaches across the table towards Taemin, and his hand is bare, the skin smooth and uninterrupted. Taemin stares at it for probably a moment too long before he looks up.

“I know, hyung,” he says and feels the tightness in every pore. He feels his back itching. The flower will probably grow back soon. “I’m— actually,” he says because he’s good at diversions. “Can you help me with my math homework? Pretty please?”

He spends a large majority of the next thirty minutes very pointedly not looking at Jinki’s hand as he points out mistakes in Taemin’s homework.

–

“Do you think,” Minho asks him, sitting down beside him in the waiting room backstage, “that it’s possible for people like us to have soulmates?”

Taemin looks up at him sharply. “What’s Kibum said?”

He expects Minho to look sheepish, but Minho only blinks at him for a moment before letting out a tiny laugh. “Nothing,” he answers, and crosses one leg over the opposite knee, rolling up his pants leg. There’s a tiny splotch of gardenias growing up the shape of his calf in the rough approximation of a human hand. He rolls his pants leg down quickly.

Taemin stills. “Oh,” he says, “That’s… I mean… yeah.”

“Most people say congratulations,” Minho points out.

Taemin blinks at him for a few moments. “Are congratulations in order?”

“I’d like to hope so,” Minho says, tilting his head back to stare at the ceiling instead of Taemin for a moment. “Are they not for you?”

“I’d like to hope so,” Taemin echoes, “But I’ve given up on that a long time ago.”

Minho reaches over, patting Taemin’s leg softly. He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to. They sit in silence until they’re called for mic checks a while later.

–

“What does it mean?” Jinki asks him, and Taemin whirls around so suddenly he almost falls. He catches himself on the bathroom counter, fumbling for a moment, the scissors in his hand clattering noisily to the floor.

The bathroom door had been locked, hadn’t it? He always makes sure…

But the lock has been acting up for days – he remembers Jonghyun complaining about Minho walking in on him in the shower, even though Minho rolled his eyes and said that he didn’t care what Jonghyun was doing, only wanted to piss and get out.

This though… this is much more serious than Minho walking in on Jonghyun jerking off in the shower. This is private, horrible, and Taemin sees Jinki’s eyes go to the scissors and back up again, past Taemin to the mirror when Taemin knows that he’s staring at the reflected splotch of yellow. After a moment, Jinki sighs. “Taemin, what are you doing?”

Taemin wants to scream. “I… I can’t let… the fans,” he says, but his normal excuse, the one he gave Jonghyun, falls flat. It’s not the real reason, and he can’t bring himself to lie to the real reason’s face.

“Taemin,” Jinki says, stepping towards him, reaching out his empty hand.

Taemin can’t help himself. “Don’t touch me!” he says, huddling away from Jinki, who starts back, looking almost hopelessly lost. “Just… don’t, please. I… I do this all the time, hyung.”

“You shouldn’t,” Jinki says, like he knows. Like he has any idea at all.

Taemin laughs in his face. “I have to. Please leave, hyung.”

Jinki doesn’t. He stands there, staring at Taemin, and Taemin thinks that it’s almost to spite him. He picks up the scissors, finds the stem with his fingers and slides the scissors right to the very base.

It hurts. It always hurts.

Taemin thinks it hurts worse that Jinki catches him, holding him after, while Taemin cradles the flower in the palms of his hands like he’s mourning it.

It will grow back soon, he knows.

–

_Yellow tulips: Hopeless love; also, “there is sunshine in your smile.”_

**Author's Note:**

> Imported from [tumblr](http://taeminuet.tumblr.com).


End file.
